Only Footprints
by Notary Sojac
Summary: The stars once brought Tia wonder. Now, they might be the only thing that is left.


**A bit of Tia angst I came up with, partially inspired by the rather excellent filk song "Hope Eyrie" by Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish. **

I want you to imagine the present.

Imagine the stars, and imagine the woman who, seemingly alone, stares up at them. The Milky Way cannot be seen tonight, as it has been invisible for the past nine years, its light blotted out by a crimson not-star that dominates both the night and the minds of those few who still bother to look up. She had always found the orange glow of light pollution to be more irritating than comforting, but its absence disturbed her. A little piece of humanity had vanished, fading away as the lights of cities slowly faded into nothingness.

Imagine the satellites, which now only rarely trace their way across the night. The lower ones are gone now, their orbits decaying with every pass through the atmosphere until they fall, burning, flaring, breaking like so many meteors. Imagine the woman who once built them trying not to see their fall as a metaphor.

Turn your head to the side and imagine the Moon, shining as it always has. Imagine the memories bound up in that silvery orb that glows almost forgotten next to the red star beside it. The hope. The promise. All broken now, though the Moon itself does not seem to care.

I want you to imagine the past.

Imagine a girl, only about six or seven at the time, rapt in front of a dusty classroom projector. Imagine history replaying in front of her, one small step that changed the future forever. Imagine a life being gently, though irrevocably knocked from one orbit to another, one that will take her from the stars back down to a slowly breaking Earth. The grainy images say one thing to her: Even after everything, the world is full of hope. The girl makes a promise. One day she will be there too, on that dusty rock, watching the Earth in all its glory floating in the sky.

More years pass. The woman's dreams come true in almost every regard. She is doing what she had dreamed of back when she had seen that grainy video so long ago. Almost. The woman fiddles with her glasses, the chains that had kept her from touching the stars with her own hands. Some dreams are not meant to happen. This is good, though. Even as she cannot explore as she had wanted as a child, she can help others reach those same stars she had seen. In time, she found another to travel with her, a man who also looked to the future with wonder, though his focus was not on the stars, but on the people who would one day, perhaps, create the world that would finally touch them. Imagine two lives, looking upward, with nothing but possibility ahead of them.

Imagine a world breaking. Imagine the cracks starting to form. A new star appearing in the sky, hanging in an orbit that, no matter how the woman did and redid the calculations, never did seem to make sense. Six astronauts and cosmonauts, never to be heard from again, the wonder of metal and glass they traveled in disappearing just as that impossible star rose. Imagine rubble and smoke, and the haunted look in eyes that would never have the light the woman knew in them again. School had been in session. No more. Never more. Imagine pieces of a life falling from the sky, burning, dying. Imagine a second promise, one made in loss, in desperation, a final stopgap against a world that was crumbling beneath her feet. She would learn what she could to save those who remained.

I want you to imagine the future.

Imagine the future she sees in those dark nights, when the brightest light is that red glow, the one that took her, took everyone's world away from her. The red glow that even stole away the man she loved. Imagine the human race, a universe full of glittering stars that flare and fade, too far away to bring new life from their demise. The heat death of a civilization.

Imagine, in that cold and silent world, a celestial body yet more cold and silent than this. Imagine footsteps, trod upon gray, powdery ground, preserved for millions of years after the last human breath has stilled. Imagine the hope of humanity that lingers on even after the last of them have died, and the eulogy that is placed upon the machines that they left behind. Imagine music, of guitars, of whalesong, of symphonies, that may still yet play, voices carrying on even after they have been silenced in reality. "We are here," they say, even though the people who wrote them are long gone, like the echoes of stars that still shine in the night long after they have burned out.

And back on that cold, desolate body, imagine a plaque that still shines gold, defying the will of time, set in place the day the woman first truly looked up. There are words that live on, in all their defiance, in all their irony.

We came in peace. We left in war.


End file.
